On Wednesday, the Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.
Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.
Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.
Not to be confused as completely frugal, the Republicans call to finish construction of border wall projects proposed by former President Donald Trump. And not to be confused as focused, the budget includes the word “woke” 37 times.
Here’s a link to the actual press release which contains links both to the actual budget as well as paragraph by paragraph summaries.
Thi budget has the word “Biiden” in it more times than it does budget. I also includes the words “woke ideology”. Definitely a very serious attempt to look at our spending and not just political bullshit.
The line “Prohibiting trust fund assets from being used for non-trust fund programs” just cracks me up. “People should be able to spend money how they want! Except like that or on things I don’t like”.
“It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.”
TIL that a middle class family benefiting from the tax dollars they pay for is ‘fraud’. Since the rich pay no taxes, they have to right to tell us what to do with our own tax dollars. Simple as. Plus, it’s FOOD in the US, we grow so much that NOT diverting some of the extra crops to school lunches is pure waste.
U.S. will give billions of dollars to support genocide, but won’t feed it’s own children. We’ve surpassed biblical levels of evil.
I’d MUCH rather STARVE hungry kids so Elon Musk can make a couple extra dollars!
-Save The Children Republicans.
Oh, no, no, it’s “Think of the Children”! Saving them requires actual effort.
/s
My anti abortion friends will say “the problem is they don’t care about the children after they’re born” and then happily go vote for trump again this Nov because their church told them joe Biden is the devil.
The Panthers need to come back
Do it.
I will start a free lunch program the next fucking day, I have a whole city full of fucking commies ready to go, I will feed your babies bellies delicious food and I will feed their minds revolutionary proletarian theory. I will teach their parents about Marx and Lenin and Fanon, Luxemburg and Kwame Ture. and we will take this shit over.
Ideologically driven psychos forget how this shit started in the first place. We remember.
I’ll volunteer if you’re around me lmao
Divine rage.
I worked a breakfast grill at a restaurant as a teen and got pretty good at it. I’ll make that kid the most perfect breakfast omelette they’ve ever eaten. And I’ll bring the ingredients if we’re short.
Also worked @a food pantry not long ago, warehouse work mostly but I got to see some of the parents and kids who showed up, long lines out into the northern cold, every day we were open, just to get a day or two’s worth of something to eat.
Anyone who would means-test a kid out of a free school meal, or deny them altogether, is some kind of sociopath monster.
“We literally just want to make things worse for everyone involved.”
Republicans hate everyone & everything— except white men
Except white men and controlling the rest, hence the support for a dumb wall
They like the wealthy, most happen to be white males but white men that aren’t rich people that don’t donate to them can use their boot straps. They care about that demographic at elections and most are willing to vote against their interests.
So when do you think they’ll apply “If any, then none” logic to corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns?
Never? Oh, really then.
The suffering is the point.
corporate lobbying, campaign finances, …guns
And the military-industrial-complex, which is sort of all-of-the-above, yeah. It’s got waste, corruption, criminality (see Boeing), and “bad finance” (meaning public debt finance of any sort) from top to bottom, through and through, yet Republicans can’t get enough of it. Starving a kid is fighting “socialism”, but starving a socialized military or a
defenseoffense contractor of a penny … now that can’t be tolerated.
Where are we going to get the money to balance the budget? Out of the mouth of babes, apparently.
I just checked with my k-12 schools. Breakfast is about $2 based on level of schooling, while lunch is around $3. At that point, I kind of wonder if it’s really worth it collecting the money when it probably does little to collect revenue. Just make it easier for everyone.
The point is not to balance the budget. The point is cruelty.
I bet there are a bunch of programs where the overhead of means testing and collecting payments is enough that it would actually be cheaper to just make it a universal benefit.
Exactly. There’s a lot of infrastructure that goes into payment. It’s also another thing that low income parents have to deal with.
Why the fuck is it so important to you freaks that children don’t eat food?
Does the Devil pay you a dollar everytime a starving kid gets hunger pangs?
Because feeding and supporting children doesn’t get their single-issue voters to the polls the way forcing them to be born does. Once the child is born they are no longer of political value to Republicans.
Cruelty is the point.
More proof that Republicans don’t care in the slightest about children one they’ve been born.
They care about nobody. What was the last Republican sponsored bill that would objectively make anyone’s life better?
Somehow they have their base frothing at the mouth about these Democrat-led initiatives that help folks (not just Democrats), yet they put forth no proposal to help anyone.
They are the party of taking things away from people not like them, but also the party of taking things away from people just like them. They are not the party of helping anyone. I cannot fathom how the large portion of their base who could be helped by such programs fails to see this.
These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things. I wish the worst for them. They’re evil.
I did finance for a large school district in another life and the sad thing is, it’s simply cheaper to just give everyone free lunch, than to have monitored programs. It only financially makes sense in affluent districts where very few children receive it. And there are less of those than you would think.
So this is especially evil to me.
Another anecdote is we got a grant and had no idea what the hell to use it for (because grants are annoyingly specific) but we figured out we could use it for breakfast. So we just rolled out free breakfast for all elementary and middle school students, eventually high school option too. That seemed to increase test scores more than any other change the whole time I was there.
A related anecdote is the free breakfast program basically saved a teacher from going broke on apple buying. She came from an affluent district, and in her previous classroom she would leave a bowl of a dozen apples on her desk and replenish as needed to encourage students to eat healthier, because she noticed the kids were eating a lot of pop tarts, dunkin donuts stuff, muffins, etc. Not many kids took up the apple offer. She comes over to our district, sets up her classroom and doesn’t realize that most of these kids didn’t have a poptart to their name, and were lucky to score a toast em pop up every once in a while. So first day all apples gone, next day she brings in more. By the end of the month the poor woman is buying like a bushel of apples or more a week… Finally the breakfast program started and she could catch a break. She would have bankrupted herself on apples.
Means testing has always been the best way to destroy a public good.
These fucks waste so much time (and money) on such stupid things.
This is actually the best argument against what they are doing. I fully support not paying for other kids food when they dont need it, but if we spend a trillion on military every year, they dont care about fiscal conservatism.
Healthcare: $300b
Infrastructure: $150b
School lunches: $15m
War: $69,420b
Someone who’s good at the economy help me budget this. My country is dying.
Split the war budget 50/50, with half going to school lunches and the rest going into guillotines.
Republicans: Will somebody think of the children?!
Republicans:
If the children are fed, they won’t want to work in the chicken processing plants, have you considered that? What are we going to do, pay adults a living wage to process chickens? Get out of here.
